Get Up!
by WizMonCruWil
Summary: I saw Before I Fall the other night, and was really struck by it. It gave me that familiar itch again, so I wrote this. Ten years after the events of the movie, Kent McFuller is still trying to move on. Will he find peace after losing Sam Kingston, the woman he loved? Enjoy!
1. Chapter 1: Another February 13th

**Chapter 1: Another February 13th**

 _I can still see her contemplative gaze as her fingers play with my curls of blond hair. "We'd better get going, then," she murmurs. "I don't have much time." And then she is kissing me like it is the last time she will ever get to do so. It isn't quite the last time, but unbeknownst in this moment, it will be soon._

 _And then we are at my back door, and I am begging her not to leave._

 _"And I meant everything that happened back there - that's all I can say, that I meant it, and I wish it hadn't taken me so long." She is rambling, gaze full of regret that constricts my heart like a noose. Gives me a sense of foreboding._

 _"Are... are you in trouble?" I latch onto her as she lunges for the door again. "You can trust me."_

 _She gazes at me with sadness and love. "You can trust me back," and her voice is broken as she fiercely kisses me goodbye before springing out the door, screaming into the night, "JULIET!"_

 _And then I am running through the woods, the fog thick around me. Thicker than pea soup, as I yell for Sam. The jumps forward in time are quite sudden, like someone is fast-forwarding for a few seconds and then resuming the tape in a funny, sick game._

 _I have just reached the edge of the trees, my eyes barely focusing on the new clearness before me when I see the headlights. Hear the screech of brakes more painful than a record scratch. Two bodies illuminated in harsh light, diving. The yell of a name that isn't Sam's. There is only one body now, flying through the air, looking far too graceful for the present moment, as though she is a gymnast coming off the high bar, and for just a second, I expect for Sam to stick the landing, right herself on her feet like a cat._

 _But she doesn't, and her body skids into the pavement so hard that it sickeningly bounces once, and then comes to a shuddering halt. Another form is bending over Sam in abject disbelief, and I know it must be Juliet, even as I fling myself into the road._

 _"NO!" And I gather her up in my arms. "Sam... S-AAM!" The last call is spliced and primal, and I feel like a creature that has lost its mate. I can feel the warmth draining from her, and with horror I watch the light in her eyes start to fade._

 _But then it holds on, for just a glimmer, and she is shaking furiously._

 _"What have you done, Sam?" I croak. "Why?" Juliet is of no help, kneeling beside me and bawling and not caring who sees or hears. Behind me, somewhere far, far away, a car door slams. Footsteps approach, but I can only focus on one thing at a time - first priority, the woman in my arms._

 _"It was... meant to be this way," Sam murmurs chokingly._

 _"Please," I weep. "Don't die..."_

 _"H-hold me," Sam gets out. "One more time." And we come together as one, sharing a sweet kiss, and I know she is bidding me farewell, though I refuse to accept it. Then Sam curls into me, the last glimmer of white flys from her irises, and she is still. The footsteps behind me stop - the driver of the cursed truck, no doubt - but nothing is said. I stare at Sam's lifeless body, unmoving._

 _"Go get help," I whisper, my voice bizarrely calm. Juliet sits there like a deaf-mute. "GO GET HELP!" I scream at her, and she springs away, towards the truck driver and they both hustle to the cab; I hear someone mention a carphone._

 _"NOOOOO!" I scream into the night, clutching Sam close like she is a baby and coming apart in wracking sobs, the glare from the headlights blinding my vision..._

* * *

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! The alarm clock blares through my consciousness almost pathetically, whining like a toddler that hasn't gotten a cookie, and I spring into the real world, gasping, arms flailing against the sheets. My heart plummets further into my stomach as my body drops sharply with it, and I hit the floor hard when I half-fall out of bed. The glare is strangely still there, and I shield my eyes against it, against the brightness streaming through my floor-to-ceiling windows that still makes me feel like I'm waking up in the middle of the sun.

Just thinking the phrase makes another memory from that accursed day spring to my head unbidden, of Sam saying the phrase in perfect time with me. The charged look we shared after.

Ten rotations of the sun, it has been. Ten rotations of waking up in the middle of that sun but not feeling its warmth. And the cold is always - always - the worst every time I go to bed on February 12th, Cupid's Day. And of course, this year, February 12th fell on a Friday, which makes the sharp stab of grief ever more cruel.

It's been ten years since I lost Sam Kingston, the love of my life.

Wordlessly, I get myself up off the floor and stagger for the shower, going through the motions as I cleanse my body even as I can do nothing to cleanse my tortured mind and soul. If I hadn't had that party - that stupid, _stupid_ party - she would be alive. And maybe we would be...

But who knows what we would have been? I'd like to think that we would have worked, and maybe someday have gotten married. What would she be doing now? Have a career, perhaps?

I shake my head like a wet dog, as I pull the towel around myself. Why dwell on the hypothetical when it never will happen? I've never been able to give myself a satisfactory answer, much less let the question go.

Reaching my closet, I yank out my uniform and methodically prepare myself with care. Button the dark shirt. Thread my belt. Pocket my gun in the holster.

Ridgeview, Washington only has a moderate amount of crime - not too little so that we are bored by paperwork, but not too much to leave our units scrambling from stress. I step from my door into the unseasonably warm summer sun - 65 degrees the day before Valentine's Day! This is the Pacific Northwest, not North Carolina! - and clamber into my cruiser, coasting towards downtown even as I keep a careful ear on the scanner.

"All units: civilian down on West Street - apparent heart attack, paramedics have been called..." Yup. A dreary, predictable morning.

If I am honest with myself, I joined the force after college in large part due to Sam. To prevent what happened to her from ever happening again to another young girl, or any child. So far, my success has been a pretty mixed bag. I have received the unfortunate assignment that no officer wants, to force your feet to move up to that front door and knock - usually in the middle of the night - and tell the terrified parents behind it that I'm terribly sorry, but your child has been in an accident... It never, never gets any easier.

I swing into the Ridgeview Police Station and exit my cruiser, striding into headquarters and willing myself to focus. I reach my desk with only a few hellos, and begin attending to the morning reports from night-owl patrols. I've been on that beat before, and still am amazed that the reports are coherent and detailed, much less legible. Making a few nitpicky edits, I work up a rhythm filing them away into the database.

Around mid-morning, my desk phone rings, and I answer quickly. "Hello, this is Officer Kent McFuller."

"Hey, Kent, it's Elody. How are you feeling today?"

I smile a smile crinkled with sentimentality and age. When I was in high school, I had never expected for any of my friendships to last beyond that time. And certainly not with the last people I would have expected to have contact with. But that is what Sam left in her wake. From the moment that triumvirate of girls dragged me into their pew at her funeral and insisted that I sit with them, we became friends, and friends we would remain. Elody confronted me with sympathy in that very pew, asking me point-blank if I had been in love with Sam. At my astonished gaze, she admitted that she had seen Sam kiss me goodbye at the party.

"You know, a few more years of this, and this tradition will start to get schmaltzy," I crack. She laughs, but I can hear the sadness in her voice, even over the phone. "How ya been, Els?"

Elody ran as fast as she could from Ridgeview the moment graduation was over, and hasn't looked back. Neither have Ally and Lindsay. Not one of them looked back, well, except to check on me. Keep tabs on me.

"I've been all right," she admits.

"Hey, we're having bipolar weather patterns, like in your neck of the woods," I joke, trying to keep the conversation light for just a little longer. Elody is a publicist down in North Carolina, and more than once has decried the seesawing climate there on Facebook.

She giggles, but it feels forced. Then her breathing goes quiet. "Can you believe it's been ten years?"

And, there we are. We have arrived at Sam. I breathe deeply. "No," I smile sadly, wistfully. "I can't."

A pause, and then. "I miss her."

"I do too," my voice rumbles low, gentle, trying to sooth her.

"Well, Lindsay should be calling you later today," she changes the subject briskly, and the old Elody is back. "And I'll badger-text Ally to pick up the phone until she does too. I gotta go pick up the kids from daycare. Almost lunch." I forgot that she's three hours ahead.

"Bye, old friend," I murmur as I hang up. No sooner have I laid the receiver to rest than it vibrates again. "Hello, this is Officer Kent McFuller."

"Ugh, do you always have to answer the phone like that?" The scorn is not nearly as grating as it once was, and over many years I have learned to recognize when it comes from a place of affection.

"Hey, Lindsay."

"Just calling to make sure you... well, to see how you are holding up today."

I sigh. "It's _that_ day, Linds. It will never get any easier."

"I know," she murmurs, almost motherly - an adverb I _never_ expected to match to Lindsay Edgecombe. "Just don't die on me, McFuller."

I wince at her bluntness. "I've been dying a little bit every day for ten years, Linds."

"Ugh, you're so romantic, I can't even deal! You sound like my husband when he's drunk!" she teases. "Please come out to the big city when you're on leave. Patrick and I would love to have you."

"Keep a block open for Easter?"

"I'll put the deets in my calendar app the second you send them," she chirps. "Bye, love."

"Bye."


	2. Chapter 2: The Love of His Life

**Chapter 2: The Love of His Life**

Lindsay hung up the phone more wearily than her voice had sounded in its signing off. She sighed. "I swear, if that boy even thinks of turning his weapon on himself, I'll discharge the thing myself and _then_ stop him!" The sun was just rising into the California sky through the kitchen skylight as her husband came down the stairs, wrestling with his tie.

"Who was that, honey?"

"Kent McFuller, up in Ridgeview. I invited him to visit us over Easter weekend. We could take him around Balboa."

"Kent McFuller, as I live and breathe!" Patrick smiled. "How's that old sonofabitch doing?"

"Hopefully fine, considering what day it is," Lindsay sighed.

"What's special about this day? Valentine's Day isn't until tomorrow. Which reminds me: you're going to love my surprise." Patrick buzzed her cheek as he circumnavigated the kitchen island.

Lindsay spun around to face him, fix him with a hard stare. "Don't you remember? Today's the anniversary of when Sam Kingston died."

Patrick froze over making his coffee. "That's today?" he mused. He clearly meant for it to sound casual, but was betrayed by the hollowness in his voice.

Lindsay nodded. "12:39 this morning."

Patrick shuddered. "Jesus, Linds, don't be so morbid! You even know the fucking time! I assume you got it from Kent as he threw back a cold one and cried into it!"

Lindsay sighed. "Patrick -" But her scolding held no fire.

"I mean, I just don't understand why he hasn't moved on! He's married to his work and we still haven't hit our quarter-life crisis. The least he could do for himself is date a little, get over it," Patrick ranted as he fixed his breakfast, balancing his briefcase on the empty chair next to him.

Lindsay regarded her husband sadly. "Moving on and getting over it are two _very_ different things. Patty... he lost the love of his life. If you ever lost me, do you think _you_ would ever move on?"

A shiver passed through Patrick like an electric shock. "Of course not! Just... please, stop it, Linds, you're scaring me!" He wolfed down a few more bites of cereal, crossing to rest his hands on his wife's shoulders. "I know you miss her. _I_ miss her. Shit, we _all_ do. And I know you're trying to be a good friend, and I love you for that. But... sometimes I think we left Kent behind in 2017, and he's never been able to fight his way out."

Lindsay nodded. "It's concerning, I get it," she murmured. "But I think a part of him needs to live in the past. To remember her."

Patrick nodded sadly, in understanding. "Gotta go, I'm late!" He kissed her goodbye deeply, and leapt for the door.

"Don't run any reds! Newport Beach traffic sucks!" Lindsay called after him in warning.

"Got it!" he volleyed back, just before the front door slammed.


	3. Chapter 3: Come Wake Me Up

**Chapter 3: Come Wake Me Up**

 _"I imagine death so much, it feels more like a memory... Is this where it gets me? On my feet, several feet ahead of me? I see it coming, do I run or fire my gun, or do I let it be? There is no beat, no melody..."_

The quiet words of Hamilton, unaccompanied, torment me as much as they perversely soothe me. Was Sam thinking something of the same as that car hurtled towards her?

 _"Rise up! I'm running out of time... my time's up!"_

Sam's voice: "I don't have much time... Saving...I wish it hadn't taken me so long... It was meant to be this way..." It was like she _knew_! I wonder how she knew?

 _"Eyes up! Eyes up... I can see the other side... Teach me how to say goodbye..."_

The white noise comes faster, until I hear the cry of, "Eliza!" Unconsciously, Sam's name appears on my lips. Suddenly, the static of my thoughts are interrupted by my partner, Tom Ranft, whining, "Aw, shit, McFuller! Can you change the track? Or put on the radio? This shit's too eerie! Put on some of that rap!"

I sigh, and turn the dial back, and the pulsing beat of Non-Stop blares. "Sorry, Ranft."

Duke Mulgrew, another deputy and friend, chuckles from the back seat. "Why so quiet today, Kent?"

"Why, don't you know?" Ranft sniggers from the shotgun seat. "He gets like this every February the 13th. You lost your girlfriend, right?"

I don't answer, keeping my eyes on the road and my hands resolutely on the wheel. I make a turn and there it is, up ahead. Somewhere along this country road - I can't quite pinpoint where, and maybe it's better that I've never been able to - but somewhere on this stretch of asphalt, Sam was hurled into the afterlife. "Yes," I say shortly.

"Yeah, what was her name?" Dave muses. "Kennedy... Karter..."

"Kingston," I almost spit. "Samantha Kingston."

"Oh, yes," Miranda Goldsberry, another colleague, clucks her tongue next to Dave in the backseat. "It was awful. Hit by a car while pushing another girl out of the way. Fucking town got spooked and couldn't shake it off for years."

"Yeah, cause the damn girl she saved went and shot herself a couple years later anyway," Ranft scoffs.

I see red, and have to squint to push through it so I don't drive clean off the road. Juliet Sykes. Committed suicide right after college. She had always been a little off, but she spiraled even deeper into the ether after Sam died. They say her body was found with her holding a picture of Sam, though that's never been confirmed. Damn fool! Didn't she want to have Sam's life still mean something? But no, she had to cancel my girl's sacrifice out so that it was pointless anyway!

I get off that cursed road, and enter the heights of Ridgeview, pulling up next to the bus stop, and my colleagues get out. "Hey, thanks, McFuller," Ranft claps me on the back. "Later!"

"Later," I mumble. And I turn for home. As I speed back to Ridgeview, the speakers pulse and blare.

 _"How do you write like you're running out of time, running out of time, are you running out of time - how do you write like tomorrow won't arrive... how do you write every second you're alive, every second you're alive, every second you're alive?"_

* * *

 _I wake up in my bed, and right away I realize that it is double its normal size. Rolling over, I can feel that the mattress is still indented and warm. Curious, I throw back the covers, hurriedly dress in my uniform, and pad down to the kitchen. I can hear clanging coming from the sinks, and I freeze. Who is there?_

 _"Hello?" I call, rounding the corner. A woman is at the counter with her back to me, but, hearing my tread, she spins around happily._

 _My heart nearly stops._

 _"No... it can't be..." And I stagger back a step, my voice a hoarse whisper. "You're dead... I saw the car..."_

 _From the way she is beaming, her heart-shaped face framed by a halo of auburn hair, Sam appears not to have heard me. "Good morning, honey!" she chirps. She runs forward to embrace me. I barely hug her back, still in disbelief._

 _"Sam... what are you doing here?"_

 _"I live here, silly," she chuckles. "Besides, what wife would I be if I didn't see my husband off to work?" She pinches my cheek affectionately, kisses me softly again._

 _I find myself smiling. If this is the dream it surely is, then I never want to wake up. Sam looks as beautiful as she did the day she floated away. Only she is not frozen in time at 17 years old; rather she is aged to appear as she might have at 27. Healthy and happy and whole and alive. She guides me to a seat at the table, and places a plate of eggs and toast in front of me. A little bit of yolk must stick to the stubble on my cheek, for she reaches around and wipes the smudge off my face gently as I finish._

 _Smiling gently, she kisses me. "Zoe's upstairs, asleep," she whispers against my lips. I have to clamp my teeth down on my tongue to prevent myself from stupidly asking who the hell that is. Is that... our daughter? Do we have a child together in this alternate reality? Sam gathers her purse. "I have to go to work. I love you." She kisses me again, far more soundly and indecently this time. "You are a hero, my love._ _My_ _hero. A good man. A generous man. Everyone would do well to see you as I do." She heads for the door and opens it. Then, she turns back, pausing on the landing, backlit by the brilliant sun so that she truly looks like an angel. Ethereal. She beams with pure adoration. "My love, take your time. I'll see you on the other side." Blowing one last kiss, she closes the door behind her._

I wake up smiling.

* * *

 **A/N: "I can usually drink you right off of my mind But I miss you tonight. I can normally push you right out of my heart But I'm too tired to fight. Yeah the whole thing begins And I let you sink into my veins And I feel the pain like it's new. Everything that we were, Everything that you said, Everything that I did and that I couldn't do Plays through tonight**

 **Tonight your memory burns like a fire With everyone it grows higher and higher I can't get over it, I just can't put out this love. I just sit in these flames and pray that you'll come back. Close my eyes tightly, hold on and hope that I'm dreaming. Come wake me up!**

 **I know that you're movin' on I know I should give you up But I keep hopin' that you'll trip and fall back in love Time's not healin' anything Baby this pain is worse than it ever was**

 **I know that you can't hear me but baby I need you to save me tonight**

 **Tonight your memory burns like a fire With everyone it grows higher and higher I can't get over it, I just can't put out this love I just sit in these flames and pray that you'll come back Close my eyes tightly, hold on and hope that I'm dreaming. Come wake me up! Oh I'm dreaming. Come wake me up!" ~ Rascal Flatts**


End file.
